TY  - EJOUR
AU  - Alexandros, Boulakis Paradeisios
AU  - John, Simos Nicholas
AU  - Stefania, Zoi
AU  - Sepehr, Mortaheb
AU  - Christina, Schmidt
AU  - Federico, Raimondo
AU  - Athena, Demertzi
TI  - Variations of autonomic arousal mediate the reportability of mind-blanking occurrences
JO  - bioRxiv beta
CY  - Cold Spring Harbor
PB  - Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY
M1  - FZJ-2024-07505
PY  - 2024
AB  - Mind-blanking (MB) is the inability to report mental events during unconstraint thinking. Previous work shows that MB is linked to decreased levels of cortical arousal, indicating dominance of cerebral mechanisms when reporting mental states. What remains inconclusive is whether MB can also ensue from autonomic arousal manipulations, pointing to the implication of peripheral physiology to mental events. Using experience-sampling, neural, and physiological measurements in 26 participants, we first show that MB was reported more frequently in low arousal conditions, elicited by sleep deprivation. Also, there was partial evidence for a higher number of MB reports in high arousal conditions, elicited by intense physical exercise. Transition probabilities revealed that, after sleep deprivation, mind-wandering was more likely to be followed by MB and less likely to be followed by more mind-wandering reports. Using classification schemes, we show higher performance of a balanced random forest classifier trained on both neural and physiological markers in comparison to performance when solely neural or physiological were used. Collectively, we show that both cortical and autonomic arousal affect MB report occurrences. Our results establish that MB is supported by combined brain-body configurations, and, by linking mental and physiological states they pave the way for novel, embodied accounts of spontaneous thinking.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)25
DO  - DOI:10.1101/2024.03.26.586648
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1034748
ER  -